It’s no exaggeration to say that cloud computing is transforming the way organizations manage and adapt to business conditions and opportunities. Because it’s based on an elastic operational expense model (as opposed to an up-front capital investment approach), a cloud-based strategy helps organizations be more responsive and scalable when it comes to changing business demands.
But what about cloud-based printing? What options exist for organizations that are looking to shift their enterprise printing and print-management solutions into the cloud?
At PrinterLogic, our answer is PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).
Before I get ahead of myself, though, it might be helpful to explain why traditional on-premises enterprise print management can be challenging and how these challenges affect our attitudes and thinking about cloud-based printing.
One of the most common print-infrastructure paradigms is the use of print servers. These servers are generally deployed in one of two configurations: consolidated (one centralized print server) or distributed (multiple localized print servers). With the consolidated model, all printing across the enterprise is riding on a single server, which creates a serious need for redundancy. With the distributed model, the print infrastructure is spread out across the network for added robustness.
This has led to a mindset among many IT professionals that print-management solutions need a lot of infrastructure in order to be suitable for the enterprise. Which is why the idea of eliminating print servers makes them incredibly excited, and deeply skeptical, at the same time.
It’s also led to a belief that enterprise printing, by its very nature, is complex, time-consuming and costly. The idea of cloud-based print management, if it’s done right, runs counter to that. Perhaps that’s why some organizations consider moving print servers to the cloud as part of their digital transformation. But there’s a far better solution that leaves legacy print servers and their associated disadvantages in the scrap pile.
PrinterLogic SaaS is a serverless, cloud-based printing platform for the enterprise
As we’ve shown with our on-premises solution (just look at the dozens of case studies), PrinterLogic’s next-generation software has the ability to eliminate print servers completely while providing organizations of all sizes with a centrally managed direct-IP printing platform. With less infrastructure comes more oversight, more control, more functionality, and more ease of use.
To those familiar with legacy print-management solutions, that might sound like a paradox. To us at PrinterLogic, it’s all in a day’s work.
PrinterLogic SaaS takes the proven success of our robust on-premises solution and brings it to a highly scalable, serverless printing platform for organizations that are migrating to the cloud. Like its on-prem counterpart, a single instance of PrinterLogic SaaS can eliminate every last one of your print servers—even in a large or highly distributed print environment.
PrinterLogic SaaS features PrinterLogic’s powerful and intuitive centralized management. This is a big advantage of cloud solutions in general, so it makes sense that we would include it in our cloud-based platform. Using the web-based administrative console, IT professionals can make comprehensive as well as granular changes to printers, drivers and profiles across the entire print environment from a single pane of glass.
With PrinterLogic SaaS, end users get access to the right printers, at the right time, based on where they sit and how they move about the company throughout the course of their day.
Other print-management solutions are content to offer basic cloud-based printing functionality—if they even offer it at all.
PrinterLogic SaaS goes beyond mere cloud-based printing
PrinterLogic SaaS also provides optional mobile and pull-printing capabilities. These features allow mobile, BYOD and guest users to print conveniently from any modern mobile device to any authorized network printer. With mobile printing, organizations can empower the ever-growing number of employees with tablets and smartphones without having to augment or replace their existing printer fleet, or adding to administrative overhead.
When using PrinterLogic SaaS’s optional pull and secure-release printing, our new Print Release App makes things even more user-friendly. From a single app on their smartphones, iOS and Android users can easily view their held print jobs and release them to an authorized destination printer of their choice. Any network printer can be configured as a pull or secure-release printer, which eliminates the need to upgrade printers or buy costly badge-release systems.
Furthermore, our direct-IP printing model minimizes WAN reliance that can impact your other cloud solutions. PrinterLogic SaaS sets up one-to-one connections between endpoints and printers and keeps all print jobs on the local network. Even if your internet connection is interrupted, printing continues as usual. Downtime from print-server failures and WAN interrupts that often plagues legacy print-management solutions simply isn’t a problem with PrinterLogic SaaS. Plus, keeping your print jobs local improves security because your confidential data stays where it belongs—behind your organization’s firewall.
PrinterLogic SaaS also integrates seamlessly with VMware and Citrix to enhance printing and print-management in those popular virtual environments.
Just as organizations like the Northwest Area Education Agency (check out the case study) have experienced, PrinterLogic SaaS’s unparalleled cloud-based printing and mobile-printing capabilities—along with its other native features, such as print auditing—provide a print environment that’s scalable, reliable, robust, incredibly manageable and cost-effective. Sign up today to test PrinterLogic SaaS in your own environment free of charge for 30 days.